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| Meroitic | ||
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| Spoken in: | Sudan | |
| Region: | Meroë | |
| Language extinction: | ~400 AD | |
| Language family: | Nilo-Saharan Eastern Sudanic Meroitic |
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| Writing system: | Meroitic alphabet | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | – | |
| ISO 639-3: | – | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
The Meroitic language was spoken in Meroë and the Sudan during the Meroitic period (about 300 BC-400 AD), and is now extinct. It was written in two forms of the Meroitic alphabet, demotic, which was written with a stylus and was used for general record keeping, and hieroglyphic, which was used for royal or religious documents. It is not very well understood due to the paucity of bilingual texts.
The classification of Meroitic was long uncertain due to the paucity of data. However, recently Claude Rilly (IPA: [ʁij]) convinced the annual Nilo-Saharan Conference that Meroitic is an Eastern Sudanic language, closest to northern languages such as Nubian.
Kirsty Rowan has argued for an Afro-Asiatic classification of Meroitic [1].
Bibliography
- Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres (Hrsg.): Meroitic newsletter. Paris 1968 ff.
- Gerhard Böhm: Die Sprache der Aithiopen im Lande Kusch in Beiträge zur Afrikanistik, Band 34, Wien 1988, ISBN 3-85043-047-2
- Derek A. Welsby: The Kingdom of Kush, British Museum Press, London 1996, S. 189-195, ISBN 071410986X
External links
- The Linguistic Position of Meroitic, Claude Rilly, CNRS
- Meroitic - An Afroasiatic Language?, Kirsty Rowan, SOAS
- Meroitic Newsletter - online free
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